A Fine Line
by severus297
Summary: The Wizarding world has met its demise, and Hermione leaves for America and alters her name. There she meets Severus, disguised as her teacher. HGSS
1. Leaving, Destination: New Beginnings

A Fine Line

Severus297

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing, zip, zero, nada, niente. Just the plot and storyline.

I've been meaning to get this story going for a few months now, but it's been hard enough trying to keep my other one going as often as I'd like to. I'm in college now, so while I have more free time than I did in high school, I also have a job and other obligations that keep me from doing regular updates. I'm hoping that I'll get into a routine soon and make a time slot solely for fanfiction.

**Leaving, Destination: New Beginnings**

August 17th, 2003

It's only been a few weeks, but nothing has changed. So many innocent people have died to save the world from being corrupted by a great evil. So many that the wizarding world will never return to the way it once was. Hogwarts, the Ministry, Diagon Alley, it's all gone. There's literally nothing left.

With the few possessions I have left after that fateful weekend, I board a plane in London. I'll be in New York in just a few hours' time, and who knows where I'll end up from there.

I ended up in Syracuse. I had already wanted to come here, as I have a cousin that lives in the city. I thought that settling down in a small city that's set in the middle of everything would be better than living the big city life down in NYC.

It was a warm September morning as I walked down Fayette Street to catch the bus to school. After two weeks of checking out the area high schools, I decided on Nottingham. Known as the "fashion school," it's on the East side of Syracuse. This posed a small problem because my cousin lived on the West side, so I had to take the bus to school. Granted, there's a school just five blocks west of our apartment, but walking in that direction would put me in a very unsafe environment. Also, I liked the way Nottingham was structured, and the staff there were very kind and willing to help.

I got to the bus stop at Salina and Fayette ten minutes before the bus was due to arrive. It was the first day of school and I was keen to get there early so I wouldn't miss anything important. Fortunately I had the advantage of knowing where the classrooms were located, as I'd received a tour of the building by my cousin, who is also a Nottingham student.

"Come on," she said when I paused on the corner to wait for the bus. "I want you to meet someone."

We walked around the corner and into the Restaurant & Deli. It was relatively small, with six booths and a handful of tables. The service counter was in the back, with what appeared to be a small kitchen that was mostly hidden behind a wall. There was a hall to the left of the counter that must have led to the restrooms, and some coolers with various drinks and fruit in them.

My cousin led me around the booths to the one in the far-right corner that had a window facing the side of Fayette that our bus was supposed to arrive at. There was a tall, thin man wearing a green jacket, leaning over the Word Scrambler in the paper. He was as white as could be, with gray hair that was thinning out in the middle of his head.

"Morning, Bill," she said. The man in question raised his head and smiled at her.

"Good morning, Lora," he said. "And who's this person that you've brought with you?" he asked, his blue eyes meeting mine.

"This is my cousin, Hermione Randie Granger," Lora introduced me. "She prefers to be called Randie."

"Hello, Randie," Bill said, extending his hand for me to shake, which I did. "Are you a student at Nottingham?"

"Yes," I answered. "I'm a junior."

"And she's new," Lora added.

"Ah," Bill laughed as he folded his paper up and stuffed it into his bag. "I'm a teacher at Nottingham."

"What do you teach?" I asked.

"Well, I work with students with special needs," he said, getting up and leading us back out of the restaurant to the corner we were supposed to be on. "Students like your cousin, who have serious special needs," he joked.

"You shouldn't talk about yourself like that," Randie said, shaking her head. "Here's the bus."

It rolled to a stop right in front of us, and after some of the passengers got off the bus, we were the first to board. The three of us sat in the back and waited for the bus to pull out.

"Crossword, please," Lora asked Bill, while pulling a blue pen out of her pocket. He handed the paper to her, the CNY section, and she opened it up to the comics page. The crossword in question was in the top right corner, next to the horoscopes.

"I got him hooked on these just over a year ago," she said to me, noticing that I was watching her. "This is what we do in the morning."

"I keep trying to make her mad so she won't come down in the morning, but she keeps coming back," Bill said.

"It would help if you'd put some decent effort into making me not want to come down in the morning," she said.

"It takes a lot to rile her up," I told Bill.

"Apparently."

It only took ten or fifteen minutes to get to Nottingham. Because it wasn't even quarter after seven, we went to room 104 with Bill. It's the largest of two rooms that are used for the Special Education department. At 7:45, Lora and I went back out to the main hall and checked the list of names on the wall to find our homerooms for the upper-class orientation. Fortunately we had the same one.

We spent an hour and a half in "homeroom," filling out pink and white cards, getting assigned lockers and making sure they worked, etc. We got our agenda books for the year, our individual schedules and new ID cards. There was a green strip across the top of my card with the words "Centro 2003 – 4" on it. Then we went to our first scheduled class. The schedule was split into four "Days," with four or five "blocks" for each day. We were supposed to go to the first four classes for Day 1, the first four classes for Day 2, and then our fifth block class if we had one. Each class was twenty minutes long, so by the time I made it to my third block math class, it was 11. Math was the first of three classes that I shared with Lora, so we walked down to the math and art section, GW, and sat down next to each other in the third row, me closest to the door.

Our teacher, who told us we could call him Jon, was tall and quite healthy in appearance for his age. He had short brown hair and wore glasses over the deepest blue eyes I'd ever seen in my life. Jon was giving us a small speech about himself and his expectations of us. During the entire speech, he only looked at me perhaps twice. The first time was just a glance, but the second was much longer. It made me so edgy that I lowered my gaze to the floor for a second before meeting his again.

I wasn't really paying much attention to him, though I registered more of what he said than any of my other teachers that day. He'd only been at Nottingham for a few years, having come from Henninger, which is close to where he lives.

"It only takes me ten minutes to get to work in the morning, and I don't take the highway," he said.

I frowned. It sounded odd, and I tried to think of anywhere where it would take only ten minutes to get here without using the highway. That occupied me for a few minutes, while the rest of his speech wafted through my brain. He'd been in the Vietnam War, doing boiler work in California, came back when he was 27-ish, went to school for his teaching degree, and the rest is history. Then we filled out information cards and got some stuff before leaving.

Spanish was utterly boring and I had a teacher that seemed only too easy to piss off. I hadn't even made it through the first day and I was already missing Hogwarts.

I didn't want to go to lunch, so I walked to the library and stayed there for a few minutes. After almost two more hours of class, the bell rang for dismissal.

"How was Gym?" Lora asked when I got on the bus.

"It sucked," I answered, plopping down next to her. "My teacher's a cool guy but it wasn't even worth going today."

She laughed. "Think of it this way. At least you don't have it on Monday. Instead, you have it on Tuesday."

If I'd had gym for this coming Monday, that would've meant that I'd have it on Friday as well. Once a week was definitely better than twice.

I missed a few classes during the first week because I got sick, so I had to go to all my teachers and get the work that I missed. It wasn't much, with the exception of English and History. I still had to go and get my math work though. I knew that Jon didn't have a third block class so I stopped down during first lunch (there are three lunches, depending on what and where your third block class is). He didn't ask any questions, just handed me the assignments and let me hand them in the next day without penalty.

I was always really quiet in his class, still sitting in the same seat, ignoring the world as I doodled or did other work. And I was left alone. He never called on me. In fact, he only spoke to me once every class.

"Randie?"

"Yes?"

"Got your homework?"

"Uh-huh."

I was terribly homesick. I wanted to go back to Hogwarts so badly that sometimes I wasn't sure if I could make it through the day without having an emotional breakdown. So I was extremely depressed for a good two weeks. I guess it peaked in the third week of classes, because people were asking me about it. I just stopped talking to people altogether and spent more time not in school. I knew Lora was concerned but she didn't bother me about it and left me to myself.

It was the last Monday of the months and math class had just ended. I had just gotten my things together and was about to leave when he stopped me.

"Are you alright?" Jon asked. I nodded.

"You look like you're about to cry," he said. And he went on to say something else, and somewhere in conversation, he was holding my arm. I didn't know what to do so I just kinda did the same, with the same hand of the arm he was holding. I was doing my best to keep my emotions in check, but I was teetering on the edge of control.

"If you ever wanna talk or just hang out, you're more than welcome to come down here," he said before I left.

When I sat down for Spanish, my arm was still slightly cold from where his hand had been, and there was a hint of jitteriness in my stomach over it.

Math class was still boring for me. So boring that I do outside classwork in math class while the other kids learn things I already learned. Jon can see when I'm doing other stuff because I started to sit up in front, but he never says anything about it. Maybe it's because my grades are pretty good, or because I already know how to do this stuff. He still hardly ever calls on me, and I don't talk to anyone during class, except for Lora. Most of the others are a year younger than us and it makes me feel strange because I know the curriculum and they don't. I mentioned this to my teacher when I got down to his room one afternoon.

"Why are you so quiet in class?" he asked me.

"I don't want to make them feel stupid because I already know this stuff." I said.

"Do it," he replied. "Then they'll see you as a Go-To person."

Like I don't get enough of that as it is. People used to come to me for help so often that I would tell them to go and ask a teacher. My patience has become jaded because of so many stupid questions, and some people take umbrage at my lack of assistance, but it doesn't bother me so much anymore.

A perfect example of this took place the next day in my social studies class. It seems like I'm the only one who even bothers to get anything done when it's supposed to be. In fact, Mr. D, my teacher, let me get ahead of everyone else, who was working on something that had been due that class.

"Randie's got her work done," he said to a group of chattering students. "She's three pages ahead of you guys."

"That's because she's a brainiac," one girl said to him. "She should share her work with us."

Haha. Very funny. I don't think so.

A few days later, my Spanish teacher tells us we have yet another project, which involves all written work to be translated into Spanish. Having only two days to complete it, our group ceased all the usual joking and laughing in an effort to understand the task. It doesn't take long for us to start complaining.

"This would be so much easier if we understood half of what's coming out of her mouth," Deanna said after throwing her pen down in exasperation. She seems to despise our teacher just as much, if not more, than I do.

"She doesn't seem to see that we can't adapt to her method of teaching," I said while rubbing my temples.

"She just expects us to know automatically," added John. "Just because we've been learning this for five years doesn't mean we know it all like she thinks."

"And then she gets so angry when we get it wrong, and yells at us," Ariane said quietly. "How are we supposed to remember if she's confusing us with something different from what we've known all this time?"

"Who knows?" Deanna muttered under her breath. "But we better get to work before she yells again."

But she yelled at us anyway, because we "couldn't grasp" what she wanted us to do. Needless to say, we were very happy when the bell rang for dismissal. I went to GW, where I knew I'd be able to get my work done in forty minutes and have enough room to think. Unless I was having a sort of writer's block, which I was. I really needed to get my English essay done, too.

Maybe it was too quiet. Maybe my headache was preventing me from working. Maybe I was nervous about something. Whatever it was, I'd reached the point where I couldn't concentrate. At all. So I just sat there and stared at the chalkboard. The chalkboard that was just as empty and errant as my mind.

When I heard Jon's footsteps nearing the room, I quickly simulated the appearance of a working student. I must have failed, because he'd seen me staring off into space.

"Randie, Randie, Randie," he said with a smile. "Your acting skills are not up to par today."

"As always." I tried to concentrate, but my attempts were futile. Once again, I was staring through the chalkboard. So when the bell rang fifteen minutes later, I almost fell out of my seat. He noticed, of course.

"Did the bell frighten you?" He teased. I gave him a dirty look as I got my things together.

"Don't you give me your bad looks," he said in the same teasing tone.

On my way out the door, I stopped at his desk.

"Giving bad looks is my prerogative. Show me where it's written that I can't give you any." It almost came out sounding like a load of twisted nonsense. I had to fight to keep my nerves from getting in the way of me talking. He was starting to have that effect on me.

"Right here," he grinned.

"Well then, if you don't want me giving bad looks, you'll have to make me." I shot back.

"Maybe later," he replied.

"Yeah. Talk about frightened." I smirked and walked out. "See you tomorrow."

"Good day."

On my way up the ramp to the main part of the building, I realized something. Jon seemed very familiar to me. I've never seen him before, but just the way he talks and acts reminds me of someone, but I couldn't think of who it might be. Even his handwriting looks familiar to me.

Where did I know him from?

I know, it's a stupid beginning for a story. I've never been good at beginnings. Even my grammar stinks, as I noticed, but I dunno how to change it around yet. Gah!

Severus will pop up soon, I promise. Just be patient with me as I try to find a more comfortable way to ease into the story.


	2. Severus' Decision

2 Severus' Decision

It's been a long month. The war reached its peak mere weeks ago and I still haven't absorbed the outcome. Even Albus couldn't have foreseen this.

I'm exhausted from walking. I've walked for almost a week now, trying to find signs of life. Of all who fought in the final battle that weekend, a handful remain. Potter, Granger, a few Weasleys, Minerva, and thirty or so other students and their family members. Hogwarts is no more as of last I saw. I'm sure the dungeons are still well intact, but the majority of the castle is destroyed.

Of those who survived, Potter has vanished without a trace. Minerva and a group of parents and older students are trying to rebuild the school, the Weasleys are at their home, and heaven knows what happened to Granger. She left before Potter did, and apparently without telling him.

My thoughts drifted back to Potter as I paused in the intersection. Still marveled at how the "Golden Boy" survived, I wonder where he could have gone to. Surely not anywhere too far, with the Ministry tailing him.

They were tailing myself as well, along with Granger. They wanted to know who had been lost in the wizarding community, and they knew we were still alive.

Scanning the road before me, I realized that I had nothing left to return to. I had to start over, but where? I couldn't do it in Britain, surrounded by the remains of fellow colleagues and those who fought to save the world from the Dark Lord.

Sighing, I came to the only other option I had: I had to leave the country and go overseas.

September 9, 2003

I stood at my desk in a classroom, memorizing my roster. I'd finally found a job that didn't require a full background search in a small city in the middle of New York. It hadn't taken long to make the transition from my robes to casual Muggle attire, but I was still having trouble refraining from mentioning anything related to magic. Now I was acting as a Muggle mathematics teacher at Nottingham High School, and I was intrigued by how utterly ridiculous these American children are.

The bell rang at 11, signaling students to head to their third block classes. It took five minutes for the first few kids to straggle in and sit down. As it was orientation day for the upper-class students, classes were only twenty or so minutes long. I looked up to see a somewhat tall girl with dark brown hair and blue-brown eyes walk in and set her notebook down on a desk. She glanced at her watch as she walked back to the door and look up the hallway.

"Randie!" I heard her call. "In here!"

I scanned my roster again to see how many students I had for this class. There were 13, and so far we had twelve of them. Raising my head again, the girl stepped back into the room, followed by a girl who must have been Randie. When I saw Randie, I had to do a double take.

She was also tall, with chocolate curls and deep brown eyes. But when she spoke, her voice sounded hauntingly familiar to me. Too familiar.

I composed myself as the bell rang for class to start. Instead of calling the students off by name, I decided to give them a little "background" on myself, as I hadn't been a Muggle teacher before. That in itself took the entire twenty minutes, during which I made eye contact with Randie no more than twice. The first time was just a brief glance, a sweep of the faces in front of me. The second was a more lasting gaze. I knew I had unnerved her that time because her glance dropped to the floor before meeting mine again.

Not a thought of her entered my mind again until the day was over and I was preparing to leave. As I walked down to the parking lot, I tried to figure out where I must have seen her before. She was obviously British, as her voice held a thick English accent, but there was another accent to it as well. I couldn't think of where I might have known her previously.

'Must be coincidence,' I thought. 'You're homesick, Severus.'

Perhaps I was.

After that first day, I didn't see her in class for a little over a week. I'd figured that the other girl was her friend or something, so I decided to ask her about it the following Friday.

"Loralie?" I called.

"Yes?"

I met her gaze straight—black on the oddest pair of colors in one's eyes that I've ever seen. "Have you seen Randie at all?"

"Well," she hesitated. I could see from her expression that she was worried about something. "She lives with me and I see her everyday." She smiled slightly. "She's been sick with something, but she just leaves and walks downtown for a few hours before coming back and falling asleep."

I nodded, frowning.

"She's had a rough couple of weeks, Jon," Loralie added before resuming her classwork.

It sounded strange to me, but I knew Loralie was telling the truth. As it were, when Randie finally showed up for class the following Wednesday, she did look worse for the wear. She'd lost considerable weight, her face was pale, and she looked utterly miserable. She stood two feet from me as she gave a very vague explanation of why she had been absent. Her eyes didn't leave the floor until I began to speak, and when they did, I was slightly alarmed by what I saw in them.

I reached over and grabbed the homework assignments from the pile of papers next to me.

"Here's Friday's and Tuesday's homework. Only do the problems that are circled, on a separate sheet of paper, and just hand them in either next class or Monday," I told her and handed the papers to her.

"Ok," she said slowly. "Thank you."

"See you Thursday?"

She nodded, turned, and walked slowly out. Sighing, I sat in my chair and put my head in my hands.

_Green eyes…..dulled by years of pain…..he looked at me as we stood in the center of it all, and suddenly, he looked rather old to me._

"_Professor…Severus," he said, "When will it end?"_

"_Soon." I answered wearily, not even bothering to correct him for calling me by my given name._

"_You think so?" Neither of us believed me._

"_I hope so."_

_Green eyes that flashed in anger and pain when Granger screamed, a sound that cut through me like a thousand knives……the agony she endured obvious in voice only….her limp form as I lifted her off the cold ground……she was still alive…but Hermione Granger was gone forever._

The final bell was what took me out of my trip down memory lane. Shaking my head, I shut down the machine on my desk, threw my papers in my case and strode out of the building.

She came to class the next day, but it was apparent that her attention was not on the subject at hand. I saw Loralie glancing over at her from time to time, before Randie said something to her that must have been along the lines of, "I'm fine, leave me alone."

I left her alone to her thoughts, however morbid they might be. I could see that she wasn't even working on math, but I knew that if I pressed her, she'd fall apart right then and there, and would probably hate me for it.

'Wait—since when do you care about whether someone falls apart or not?' A little voice demanded in my head. I ignored it; however much I enjoy making people's lives hell, this wasn't the right place to be doing that.

It was by far the quietest class I'd taught since I left Hogwarts.

"Mike, how do we solve this kind of problem?"

It was almost 2pm and I was standing at the board, waiting for a student to answer my question.

"Find the roots?" he finally managed. "I don't know."

Biting back a sarcastic remark, I walked the class through yet another problem involving the quadratic formula and what its results mean.

"Your homework for this weekend is on the board," I said when the bell rang. "You'll be having a quiz on Tuesday on quadratic equations. Have a nice weekend."

There was quite a lot of noise as the students gathered their things together and left the class, making the already noisy hallway even louder. I waited until the noise died down a bit before sifting through the homework that had been handed in at the beginning of class. Surprisingly, it didn't take long for me to mark the grades in my book, and when I was finished, I wandered up to the main building to sign out for the week and check my mailbox.

As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw Randie getting into a green car. I braked long enough to give her room to back up and pull out in front of me. Glancing at the clock, I decided I had enough time to do some joyriding.

The Ford Focus turned onto Genesee Street and sailed down the curving road towards Manlius. I managed to stay close behind her by sheer luck, as the traffic was high with everyone heading home for the weekend. I thought she might be heading to the mall, but I was proven wrong as she rolled on by the intersection and continued past the highway bridge. For about ten minutes we rode down Genesee as it forked off to the left, until we reached Fayetteville. I was already pretty much lost, praying that either I'd remember how to get back or be fortunate enough to follow her back.

Ten more minutes of straight road, a few turns, and finally some pretty damn steep hills. I had to do 80mph to keep up with her, breaking hard to get around the sharp turns safely. The scenery was great, but I couldn't get a proper look at it while speeding through Madison County. And then I saw the lake.

It was massively long, enveloped between West, East, and North Lake Roads, and very blue. The sun glittered across the surface, glaring with every ripple of the water. But we apparently weren't there to examine the lake.

After a few more turns and what I thought was a sudden drop over a hill, she pulled into Chittenango Falls. I rolled to a stop in a spot at the far end of the lot and watched her turn the car around tightly. Then she looked over in my direction. Even from a distance I could tell that she recognized me. It never occurred to me that I should look away so that she wouldn't. I saw her check her watch for the time and then proceed to leave the park. Shifting into Drive, I fell into place behind her and resumed the reckless drive back to the city. Instead of going own Genesee, she turned onto the highway and it wasn't long before I lost her. I had no desire to follow her home. I was too tired to do anything but return to my own apartment and collapse onto my sofa.

Yea, I know: lack of dialogue. That's because they don't really know who they are in terms of who they were….or whatever.


End file.
